Adorno was attracted to Mahoganny because it displayed society’s contradictions. Art that aspired to cheerful harmony or resurrected the great soul of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture was delusive entertainment that failed to do what art should do: expose the lie at the heart of capitalism, namely that this economic system could deliver freedom and happiness. In "The Social Situation of Music’, an essay he wrote for the Institute‘s journal in 1932, Adorno opposed two contemporary composers. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, taking them as opposite poles of what music should and shouldn't be under monopoly capitalism. His bracing notion was that music, purportedly the most abstract and therefore the least socially grounded, most autonomous art form, actually contained social contradictions in its own structure. Schoenberg, in whose second Vienna school’s ethos Adorno had been trained while working with the great composer’s disciple Alban Berg in the mid 19203, had evolved during the early years of the twentieth century. He moved from being a composer of expressionist music to one who wrote music that eschewed harmonic resolutions, still less offered hummable tunes, but rather involved a musical twelvetone system, whereby the repetition of any note in a twelve-tone row was prohibited until all of them had been sounded. The harmonic resolution of, say, Schoenberg's 1899 string sextet Verkliz'rte Nacht (Transfigured Night), was unthinkable for a composer who, in the early 1930s, was so bewitched by the aesthetic purity and logic of his twelve-tone method that for the title of his uncompleted operatic masterpiece Moses Und Aron of 1932 he dropped one of the As from Aaron’s name so that it would have twelve rather than thirteen letters.
Stravinsky, for his part, in the ten years between the premiere of one of the founding texts of musical modernism, Le Sucre Du Printemps, to the premiere of his opera Pulcinella, had mutated from musical revolutionary to conservative revivalist of old forms. In the 1920s Stravinsky disinterred old musical forms the concerto grosso, the fugue, the symphony for a new era. Just as Brecht excoriated opera as culinary a mouthwatering diversion from the realities of modern life so Adorno accused Stravinsky of composing music that Offered false reconciliations, redeploying old forms that served to satisfy his audience’s degraded need for escape into a chimerical past. He also detected a connection between Stravinsky’s neo-classicism and fascism: the irrationality of the composer’s system, Adorno argued, was of a piece with the arbitrary control of a Fuhrer. He was stretching the point, perhaps, but then Adorno was apt to see Nazism in nearly everything he disliked -understandable given what it was about to do to him, his colleagues and his family.
At the time Adorno took Schoenberg, a Jew who like Adorno fled Europe with the rise of Hitler, to represent all that was progressive in music. Schoenberg’s music was, he noted not seduction by harmony and melody but ‘the conglomeration of broken shards'. But there was, he realised later, a problem with his idol’s musical system. Its absorbing logic, like that of a game of chess. detached Schoenberg from the social situation for which it provided a fitting soundtrack. Worse, Schoenberg’s twelvetone system became, Adorno later realised, hypostatised- the revolutionary form of composition became the only game m town for avant-garde composers and therefore, paradoxically, conservative. A system that had seemed to promise a breakout from bourgeois music was reified in its turn.
How did Weill’s music for Mahoganny map on to this musical taxonomy? Weill once said he would be happy if every taxi driver could whistle his melodies. One might have thought Adorno would have damned Weill’s music as part of the culture industry that helped capitalism run more smoothly, but in fact he enjoyed Weill’s music for Mahoganny. He saw in it what Benjamin loved in surrealist art, which often involved creating montages of historical detritus and thereby producing potentially liberating ‘constellations’. Adorno called Mahoganny the first surrealist opera. “This music,’ he wrote of the score, ‘pieced together from triads and off notes with the good beat of old music hall songs which we hardly recognise anymore but are nonetheless remembered as an heirloom, is hammered and glued together with the fetid mucilage of a soggy potpourri of operas. This music, made up of the debris of past music, is completely contemporary.’
Brecht’s libretto, too, sought to make it clear that the bourgeois world was absurd and anarchic. ‘In order to represent this convincingly’, wrote Adorno of the dramatisation of the bourgeois world as absurd and anarchic, ‘it is necessary to transcend the closed world of bourgeois consciousness which considers bourgeois social reality to be immutable. Outside of this framework, however, there is no position to take at least for the German consciousness. there is no site which is non-capitalist.’ This was to become one great theme of critical theory: there is no outside, not in today’s utterly rationalised, totally reified, commodity-fetishising world. When Marx wrote Capital in the mid nineteenth century, the more primitive capitalist system he was diagnosing made commodity fetishism merely episodic; now it was everywhere, poisoning everything. ‘Paradoxically, therefore’, Adorno added, ‘transcendence must take place within the framework of that which is.’ Brecht’s assault on capitalist society in Mahoganny was then paradoxically both from within and from without at the same time, both immanent and transcendent.
In this, it bore similarities to how Adorno conceived of the role of a serious music critic. In his 1929 essay ‘Motifs’, he wrote that in order for criticism not to collapse into a middlebrow alliance between dillettantism and smug, Olympian expertise, it is ‘essential for the critic to extend his immanent listening as far as possible, while at the same time approaching music radically from the outside. To think about twelve-note technique at the same time as of that childhood experience of Madama Butterfly on the gramophone that is the task of every serious attempt to understand music today? And what Adorno counselled for music criticism was true too of the critical theory that was being born in Frankfurt as Brecht and Weill’s opera was being attacked by Nazis: it was to be practised by those who realised that there was no non-capitalist perspective from which to critique capitalism and that its practitioners were implicated in what they critiqued.
Brecht and Weill’s opera, similarly. was an inside job, drawing attention to the art form's self-contradictory nature. ‘The opera Mahagonny pays tribute to the senselessness of the operatic form‘. Wrote Brecht. In this, its techniques parallel those deployed by the Frankfurt School during the 19305 as it developed critical theory in response to a clutch of -isms Horkheimer would lump together under the heading of traditional theory positivism, vulgar Marxism, among others. For Horkheimer each of these disciplines was insufficiently dialectical, and their followers made the error of imagining that there was a transcendental position from which they could observe and analyse an objective world of facts. There was no such position. and so in a sense the critical theorist risked the kind of absurdity Brecht happily embraced in writing Mahoganny. ‘It still perches on happily on the same old bough, perhaps’, he wrote in his notes to the opera. ‘but it has started (out of absent mindedness or bad conscience) to saw it through.’
You can almost hear Brecht cackling manically as the branch on which he’s sitting plummets to the ground; but there was nothing absent-minded about where he had decided to place his bottom. He Wanted musicians. singers and audience to realise that they were part of the culture industry, that the first two groups were pandering to prevailing economic interests and deluding themselves by thinking they were making art that floated free, unsullied by capitalism’s dictates; they were supplying to the latter group, at a price, opera which obeyed laws of commodity fetishism. He even, incredibly, attacked his musical partner Kurt Weill for posturing as an avantgarde composer who naively thought he was above being in thrall to economic interests. Through attacking the established ‘dramatic’ form of theatre, Brecht hoped to transform its sated spectators into observ~ ers hungering for political and social engagement.
Adomo, though he never became close to Brecht, was a kindred spin't. an Agent Orange-style critic scorching all and sundry. Sometimes even himself. But the philosopher never shared the dramatist’s agitprop hopes. Brecht hoped that there would be an abrasion between the grandeur of the opera house and the harsh message. Instead, it became another culinary treat in the operatic repertory, abemntly decoded by its audiences and then happily consumed like whiskey. 'Ihus when Mahogarmy was staged in Covent Garden in 2015, the British novelist Will Self wrote:
This museum piece a sort of diorama of failed utopianism has nothing to teach us. We can enjoy the lushness of Weill’s through composed score; we can thrill to the unvarnished portrayal of human cupidity; we can admire the repurposing of Brecht’s epic theatre as entertainment. But to expect us to be moved to a critical engagement with the fundamental terms of our social being would be frankly and idiomatically a bit much."
Something similar may be said of the Institute for Social Research as it evolved in the 1930s. It was Brechtian in its inverse relationship between scabrous critique and changing that which it critiqued. Like Brecht’s theatre, critical theory arguably postured otherwise but became another fetishised commodity the philosophical equivalent of a titillatingly ‘shocking’ night at the opera, made all the more exciting by its brush with fascism, a more or less harmless diversion for the chattering classes. Lukécs, in his damning 1962 critique of the German intelligentsia in general and the Frankfurt School in particular, suggested that, like operagoers in the posh seats watching Mahoganny, thinkers like Adorno had taken up comfortable residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss. Brecht even had a name for the residents of the Hotel. He called them Tuis (an acronym deriving from a scrambling of the German word for intellectual, i.e. Tellekt-Ual-ln). The Tuis were partisan but not members of a party, independent of official institutions yet experienced in surviving within institutions. Such Tuis, among whom Brecht included the Frankfurt School, could have helped overthrow capitalism by instructing the masses in Marxist doctn'ne. Instead, by failing to do so they effectively contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. For Brecht, the Frankfurt School were traitors to the revolution they affected to espouse.” Adorno and Horkheimer returned the abuse: they regarded Brecht as a petit-bourgeois poseur and apologist for Stalinism. One might argue there was something of the Tui about Brecht too: his theatre, like the Frankfurt School’s writings, thrived creatively during the escalation of capitalism’s contradictions; instead of destroying the bourgeois art form of opera, he extended its lifespan.
While Brecht during the 19305 brought together material for a Tui novel that he never completed but which was conceived as a satire on intellectuals in the German Empire and Weimar Republic, it was during his Californian exile that he adopted the term Tuisimus as his name for the Frankfurt School. By then, he regarded the Frankfurt scholars as prostitutes in their quest for foundation support, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive US society.
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